Apparently, not one item of glass or china or earthenware in that room had remained whole, and shards of them littered the subsurfaces. Such pieces of plastics and aluminum as turned up were brittle and useless.
A hump in the center of this space proved, upon clearance, to be a large, rust-flaking double-door refrigerator-freezer unit.
“We’ll take this apart,” said Milo, adding, “The amounts of copper tubing and wiring will make it worth the effort.”
It was when Milo, Gy and the two Staiklees raised the thing up from its centuries-old grave that they found what lay beneath it.
When Milo and the muscular Gy, between them, were able to get the trapdoor open, foul, musty air poured up from the utter darkness below. Turning to the Staiklees, he said, “We’re going to need some torches down there.”
And so they did, but only until Milo found and filled up and lit some gasoline lanterns that were in the cellar. He reflected that this cache would have been a true treasure trove two or three hundred years ago, but not now. True, there still was more than enough of value to him and to his people contained unspoiled in the sometime fallout shelter, but there was much else that now was utterly useless if not downright dangerous.
He had the seven bodies—two men, two women and three children—dragged into the room that had been the pantry, no pleasant task, as they had all begun to decompose as soon as the fresh, moist outer air got to them. That done, they began to load whatever looked usable or tradable onto the cart, and when it would hold no more, they sent Little Djahn Staiklee to drive it back to the campsite and bring back an empty one.
While searching for an easier way and possibly a wider opening to get their gleanings up to the surface, Milo found a short flight of steps leading up to an angled pair of doors, but they refused to budge a millimeter, even to the efforts of all three of the men, plus those of Djoolya.
Outside, the reason why was clear. Also clear was just why no one of them had seen the doors before: they were completely covered by a portion of the field-stone half-wall. When once the stones had been lifted and thrown off, the heavy, steel-sheathed doors opened with only a few minutes of straining and cursing and use of two of the pry-poles.
As they all squatted, panting, among the scattered stones, Milo beamed, “When first I saw them, I didn’t think those folks in the pantry there died of the plagues—none of them bore any of the easily recog-nizable signs of that kind of dying. No, I think they all got trapped down there and smothered to death. Of course, it was really the fire that did them in; with half a ton of stone blocking one exit and that humongous refrigerator on the other, no two men and two women could possibly have used either opening. Their air intakes must have gotten blocked then or soon after, and that was all she wrote for the lot of them. That’s why they didn’t start to rot until we went down there, too—there was no oxygen in the place, no breathable air.
“Let’s get them up here, out yonder somewhere, before they get any higher. The coyotes and foxes and buzzards will clean them up quickly if they can get at them.
“Since they didn’t die of the plagues, that means we can take all the bedding, too, and those are nice, thick, warm-looking blankets. Whenever Little Djahn gets back with an empty cart, we’ll load it with the best of the things down there, then close up the place to keep animals out and come back tomorrow or the next day to finish stripping it. Whatever any of you do, though, leave the sealed metal containers and the glass jars and bottles alone until I’ve had the chance to check out their contents; old as they are, anyone who even tasted of them would likely be poisoning himself.”
“But Milo,” demanded Djoolya, “what of all those pretty jars? The traders exchange valuable things for even one of those jars that has not been broken or chipped at an edge and that still has its top. Surely we aren’t going to just leave them all here?”
He leaned toward her to pat her grubby, work-roughened hand. “Oh, no, honey, we won’t leave them here. No, tomorrow or the next day, we’ll come back, dump whatever is in them out, pack them in a cartload of dried grass as far as the lake, wash them out well and put them somewhere safe to drain and dry until we’re ready to move on. I really hate to dump out that much food, but it’s all just too old to take the chance that it might still be even edible. Lest some Kindred clan wander through here and find and foolishly or innocently try to open and eat of those ancient cans, before we leave, we’ll hump them all up here and axe them open—a few poisoned coyotes won’t be any great loss.”
Spitting out the grass stem he had been absently chewing, Djim-Bahb Gahdfree asked, “What of those two big handsome steel chests, Uncle Milo? We should at least open them, I think, even if they prove too heavy to take away from here.”
Milo nodded. “They’re not so heavy as they seem, Djim-Bahb. I believe they’re just bolted to the wall or the floor or both. We will indeed open them, though I’m pretty sure I know at least part of what we’ll find in them, and whenever two or three of you get back from your clan camp with another cart for us, we’ll load up those two steel chests and take them along with us. The traders should be overjoyed to get such artifacts still in such splendid condition, with built-in lockworks and the keys to fit them.”
Gy Linsee raised an eyebrow quizzically.“Keys, Uncle Milo?”
Milo nodded. “You recall those rings of flat metal things I took off the belts of those two men’s bodies, Gy? Those were called keys, and I’m sure that at least two of them will open those metal chests.”
Before he and Gy left camp to hunt the next morning, Milo sent off Little Djahn and Djim-Bahb with spare mounts and a packhorse to seek out their clans’ camp and dicker for the purchase of the spare cart, now needed. He had them take back the now-reduced gaggle of spotted dogs, as well, for despite all precautions, one dog per night was regularly disappearing from the campsite, and protracted searches for any trace of them had been completely unavailing.
Less than an hour out of camp, Milo and Gy were lucky enough to find a young screwhorn bull—an earlier age would have called him an eland—grazing alone, a mile or more from the herd of herbivores. It was in an area of rough, broken ground over which Milo would have been hesitant to pursue the beast on horseback, but the bull elected to stand and fight and so was quickly killed with arrows from a safe distance. Then, while Milo guarded the fresh kill, Gy went back at the gallop to fetch a cart and more hands to help with the job of skinning, cleaning, butchering and transporting nearly a half-ton of meat, bone and hide. So fortunate a kill would keep the camp well supplied for several days.
Nor was food alone the value of the bull. The hide would be rendered into fine, strong leather and the hair into felt. Horn would become tools and implements; sinew, thread for sewing or making ropes. When steel needies were not available, slivers of bone could be made to serve that purpose, and still other pieces of bone, after fire-hardening and sharpening, were often used to tip hunting arrows. Cleaned and soaked and carefully stretched, then dried, the bull’s stomach pouches would become the inner linings of water containers; so too would his bladder. Hooves might be and often were rendered with fish offal to produce glue for a plethora of purposes, or sections cut from hooves made fine scaleshirts when sewed onto leather backing for war armor.